WB03 – ‘The Father, the Almighty’

I’ve hit a bit of a writer’s block on this post – perhaps because I’ve tried to do too much in one place. I’d planned to write on the whole section ‘The Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.’ But I think that really needs to be two separate articles, so here’s a shorter-than-originally-planned-but-at-least-it’s-written piece on God, our wonderful Father!

1. The short version
2. Prayer
3. Why it mattered then
   1. God as Father
   2. God as Almighty
4. Why does it matter now?
5. Gender, language and God

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The short version

To describe the ‘One God’ in whom we believe, the creed starts with the words, ‘The Father, the Almighty’.

‘Father’ comes first – for it is more important to our understanding that God is relational than that he is all-powerful. ‘God is love,’ and that is about the relationships within God before it’s about how God relates to us. That’s where we have to start thinking in terms of the Trinity, and it’s also fundamental other understanding how we can call God our Father.

‘Almighty’ is important too; we need to know that God loves us enough to want what is good for us, and also that God is powerful enough to do what is good for us. At the same time, it helps to know that God limits this freedom of power to give us a consistent, liveable reality!

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Prayer

God,
Father of Jesus, and my Father;
Source and origin of all things,
Source and origin even of your very self;

As you draw me into your own dance of love,
love for you and for me and for her and for him and for them and for all…
love for the world;
may my love for you always be deeper than my understanding of you,
and may I seek an ever deeper understanding.

For you are my Father.
I am, by your choice and will, your child.

Your love and your power together
give me confidence
that your love for me will always be deeper than my misunderstanding of you,
and that you will always seek me, beyond my deepest misunderstanding.

Thank you.

Amen.

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Why it mattered then

It might well strike you, looking at the Nicene Creed, that this first section (about God as Father and creator) is very short compared to what we will on to read about God the Son. Leaving on one side for now the bits about creation, the first person of the Trinity is described in four words – and two of them are ‘the.’

The reason for this simplicity is that belief in God as ‘the Father, the Almighty’ wasn’t controversial within the Church in the fourth century. The councils that produced the Creed were called principally to debate the nature and person of Jesus, not to write a full theology of everything, or even of everything about God.

It might be worth, though, spending a moment to think about how these two words mark out a distinctive, shared Christian understanding of God in comparison to other beliefs current at the time.

God as Father

It matters that the first word used to describe the ‘One God’ in whom we believe is relational – God as Father. The remarkable thing is that this isn’t just about God’s relationship to us; it’s also about something fundamental to the very nature of God as Christians understand him, even before there’s anyone other than God to relate to.

Language of God, or more often of a ‘chief god’ as ‘father’ wasn’t entirely unknown in the ancient world before Christianity. In the Roman Empire Jupiter was worshipped as the father of the gods, but this didn’t extend to any kind of father-child relationship to his devotees.

In the Old Testament, language of God as father (and occasionally as mother) of Israel as a nation is present, though perhaps not as one of the main images that is used to represent how God relates to his people.

Christians, then as now, saw their relationship to God as Father in a much more personal way. This was rooted in how Jesus taught them and us to live, and in particular in how he taught us to pray. This wasn’t just about God as our creator; that comes next in the creed, but it’s not the most significant part of what it means to describe God here as Father. We can address God as Father because we are invited to share by adoption in the relationship to him that Jesus has by his nature; and the centrality of this truth to our salvation, discipleship, faith and life is perhaps why this whole creed was written in the way that it is. So we’ll keep coming back to this point!

We’re also going to see through the creed something of the nature of God as Trinity. This is one of the two key themes of a Christian understanding of God which isn’t found in any other religious tradition. It’s not spelled out here as a belief or doctrine in itself, but it emerges from the whole creed, and we’ll see it coming into focus as we go on. I’ll write about the Trinity as a distinct doctrine once we get to the end of the creed – which might take a while! For the moment, I’ll just say that we start with our belief in the Father not first and foremost because of our relationship to God as his children, but because of the relationships within God’s own self on which everything else depends.

The Father is often referred to as the ‘First person’ of the Trinity, the other two being the Son and the Holy Spirit. This doesn’t mean that the Father somehow existed alone before the Son and Spirit came into being; God has always been Trinity, though it took his unfolding action and self-revelation over the centuries for us to begin to understand that truth. It does mean that the Father is seen as the ‘origin’ or source of the Trinity, and of the life and action of the whole Godhead. We’ll say more about this whole area when we come to discuss what the creed says about the Son, where the details of how Father and Son relate were among the main controversies that led to the writing of the Creed in the first place. Hopefully that will make a bit more sense in a few posts’ time – but as soon as we start using language to describe the inner nature of God, we do need the humility to recognise that none of our language is exact or adequate. So let’s be careful not to over-interpret words like ‘source’ in this context.

For that matter, we need some of the same caution about how we use the words ‘Father’ and ‘Almighty.’ All words – even one used by Jesus – to refer to God are limited and by the time they encounter our own experience and understanding of language they gather bits of meaning that may be unhelpful or even harmful. In response to helpful comments from colleagues on the first version of this article, I’ve added a note below on this.

This whole issue is the deepest distinction between what Christians mean and what Roman pagans meant in using the word ‘father’ of God or of a god. After all, no other religious tradition speaks of God in terms of relationships that exist within the very nature of God, before any other being was created. Yet this is our starting point for understanding God, and for describing God in the Creed.

God as Almighty

The word ‘Almighty’ is an interesting one. Like ‘father’ it’s part of the Christian (and also Jewish and Islamic) concept of God that seems so basic to the idea of godhood itself that we forget that it was not something which most pagans would have thought of in connection with the gods. Pagan gods were thought to work together and sometimes against one another, each with their own particular sphere of influence or special interest. They were, themselves, seen as among the first created beings. When we read the stories of gods in Greek, Anglo-Saxon or Viking culture (I mention those because they’re the only ones I’ve read to any real extent – I realise I know little about the ancient religious stories of many other, especially eastern, cultures) they often seem like exaggerated versions of fallible, human characters with great power – great but not without limits.

The Jewish/Christian/Islamic idea of God is very different, even without the specifically Christian understanding of God as Trinity. God is not subject to whims and passing ideas, has authority over every area of life and is unlimited in power and ability. Theological and philosophical thought have generally concluded, though, that God limits God’s own freedom to act in a few ways.

• God cannot, within the terms of logic which apply within creation, cause a logical contradiction; a square circle or a reality where 1+1=3 1/2.
• God cannot act against God’s own character; God cannot be unjust or unloving.
• God chooses not to act in ways that overrule human will, including in allowing actions to have consequences.

So God is not an arbitrary tyrant, who might on a whim decide to condemn kindness and approve of cruelty; that would go against God’s own nature. Nor does God – at least without rare exception – change the laws of physics and chemistry, so the created universe is predictable and comprehensible. But we’ll come on to that, as the next clause in the Creed deals with creation, and it’ll be worth thinking then about how miracles can fit within a world of order and scientific laws.

While there may in the broadest principle be absolutely no limits to the action and choice of God, we can be grateful that in the universe we inhabit, his freedom doesn’t leave us guessing blindly what will happen next – whether that’s about the created world or his own actions. And we can have confidence that God is – for he has chosen to be – knowable and consistent in character and purpose.

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Why does it matter now?

These four words, describing God, matter now as much as they did then.

They begin by reminding us that the God in whom we believe is relational; the fact that the first word used to describe God is ‘Father’ has nothing to say about gender, but everything to say about the centrality of relationship in our understanding of God.

Knowing God as our Father, and being privileged to call him Father, is at the core of Christian faith. Being welcomed as adopted sisters and brothers of Jesus is a privilege beyond measure, precisely because we are being brought somehow into the relationship of Father, Son and Spirit which is the very core of God’s being. God is our Father because he is Jesus’ father; and he is Jesus’ father as the source and origin of the Trinity, reaching through Jesus and the Spirit into our world and lives – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

God is relational. To be more specific, ‘God is love’ as St John said. And as we’ll come back to again and again.

And this God, who is love, is also almighty. We’ll come back to that in talking, next, about creation. But in terms of our relationship to God, if love and might didn’t go together, we would live in fear and insecurity. If we don’t believe that God is almighty, we will not have confidence in his ability to do what is right for us. If we don’t believe that God is our loving Father, we will not have confidence in his will to do what is right for us. And if we don’t believe in either his love or his power, we’re doing well to get out of bed in the morning and try to live rightly.

But a Father’s love, backed by almighty power – that’s a combination we can trust in.

It might not always look that way. I’d like to point you back to the third ‘limit’ on God’s Almighty power I mentioned above, and we’ll talk a bit about how God’s good creation doesn’t work the way he intended it to. But that’s next time…

For now, may you know the reality of the love and power of God your Father – and may you rejoice to believe in him, our One God.

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Gender, language and God

In the previous post I wrote a bit about how the Christian use of the reverent Jewish tradition of substituting ‘The Lord’ for ‘I am who I am’ (‘Adonai’ instead of ‘YHWH’ in Hebrew) has affected our image of God in the Old Testament.

We don’t have a parallel in the New Testament, but we do have a new issue in that the prominence of relational terms for God (Father, Son, Lord) emphasises the use of masculine titles, and however much we insist that God is not male, it’s hard to avoid our thinking and imagery being shaped by human masculine imagery. I’m grateful to two colleagues for pointing out that I hadn’t recognised this in an earlier version of this post.

To do this issue justice would need a whole post or series in itself, but I offer a few observations. At least, that was my intention, but I find after writing that this has gone on a bit, and is something of a ‘thinking out loud’.

An important starting point is to recognise that the more vivid and ‘human’ an image of God is, the more we are affected in interpreting it by our own experience of the human person or relationship to which it refers. All of us import into language of God as Father our own experience and expectations – of our human father, of the fathers of others known to us and even of our abstract idea of what fatherhood should be. None of these are inherent to God, and they affect all of us. Where someone’s past experience is particularly negative, it may well be that the image of God evoked by the word ‘father’ is so distorted that it is best replaced by another, particularly in prayer and pastoral use.

A few months ago, elements of the press manufactured an outcry when the Archbishop of York ‘suggested changing the Lord’s Prayer’ to avoid the word ‘Father’. In fact, what he had suggested in the course of a sermon was this pastoral sensitivity in situations where the word has deeply negative associations. It was an example of the sensitivity felt – or whipped up – when the word ‘Father’ is questioned in reference to God. It’s hard to imagine press hysteria about changing words like ‘Shepherd,’ ‘Ancient of Days’ or ‘Advocate,’ to pick a few others from the Bible.

Some of this is perhaps due to the intensity of current ‘culture wars’ and the intense feelings around reexamination of gendered language which have become the flashpoint in so many cases. But some is due, perhaps to the very richness of the imagery of parenthood in reference to God – and the proper centrality of this image and language in Christian faith and devotion.

I realise that I have done relatively little study on this, but these are factors in my own thought:

• In every language with which I am familiar, to speak of individual persons leads us to use gendered language. Until very recently this language was entirely binary, and the Bible translations and liturgies in use when I was ordained still reflected a masculine default – ‘men’ or ‘he’ might refer either to male or to all, depending on context.
• Jesus used the term ‘Father’ – speaking Aramaic and translated for us into Greek, and this becomes a ‘given’. However clearly we state that even this language is an approximation to truth about God, it is the word which Jesus used to describe his own relationship, which he invites us to share. I think this is why I hold fast to it as a word, while recognising that it brings associations which are not all what Jesus would have intended; and that for others, those associations may be quite different from those I recognise. To a much lesser extent, the creeds give us language which becomes a starting point for our interpretation and exploration (though I think the precise detail of that language is often affected by Aristotelian assumptions that Jesus wouldn’t have recognised). Scriptures and Creeds need constant retranslation as our use of language changes; but there is a proper caution to ensure that we are giving faithful expression to what was originally intended. Whether we agree with that is then another matter…
• God incarnate became a male human being in Jesus. In modern terms, we cannot know how Jesus would have self-identified, but the image of God in Jesus has of course been shaped by his current culture and all those since. These have – often uncritically – imported contemporary ideas of masculinity and virtue not only into their portrayal of the incarnate Jesus, but also of the other persons of the Trinity and the pre-incarnate second person (who is referred to Biblically not only as ‘Son’ but also as ‘Word’ and I would argue ‘Wisdom’ – the latter with strong feminine imagery in the Old Testament).
• Coming back to the limitation of all language in reference to God, we tend inevitably to interpret the imagery of words like ‘father’ in the wrong direction. We cannot avoid beginning with what we know; and so we bring our experience and knowledge of human fatherhood and apply that, hopefully with caveats, to God. The truth is that God is the primary reality, and that even the best of human fatherhood is only a pale shadow of the relationship which he offers to us.

Why do these particular words matter so much? Going back to my thoughts above, what matters most to me is that the language of Father, Son and Spirit describes first something of the inner being of God, as a relationship into which I am in Jesus invited by adoption to join.

Like an ideal parent, God is a source of life and being, and at the same time of love, nurture, formation and connection. None of that depends on the language I use being masculine; but it does require that the language I use, however limited, is personal and relational.

Perhaps we should look regularly at the source of our reaction when our use of language is questioned. Where to change the language would mean changing something fundamental that we are affirming about God, then it’s surely right to be cautious. But often the strength of our reaction is not because a different word or image would take away anything we believe to be essential to what we are saying; rather it is fuelled by the associations for that word or image that are particular to us from other sources, and the challenge that sparks our reaction is actually to our unconscious assumptions rather than anything that we would consciously affirm as essential.

Thanks to those who have encouraged me to look again at this. I know there’s a lot more that could be said, and I know that my thinking still has room for change and development. It always will have. One of my reservations in writing publicly about God is that I know I will get some things wrong – and in fact that some of what I believe is wrong. I just don’t know which bits yet.